The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) constitutes a fruitful site to discuss the relevance of the organizational approach to the international organizations (IOs). Recent works (Barnett, Finnemore, 2004; Bauer et al., 2017) have underlined the interest to consider IOs as international public administration, and to unpack these IOs (Trondal, 2014) in order to understand much more their role in the shaping of public policy. As in many IOs, the shaping of transnational public policy is due to the interactions between many actors and components of the international bureaucracy within the OECD. In the case of the OECD, there is an involvement of the general secretary and the committees too. Indeed, committees are at the core of the process of the policy-making of the OECD. They are intermediaries spaces between the States and the OECD bureaucracy: the general secretariat. The members of the committees are representatives of the states and still belong to their national administration. They devote a part-time of their activity to the committee. So, they contribute to define and promote policy models. The fieldwork of this proposal is based on an ongoing research on the involvement of international organizations (such as the OECD) in the transnational shaping of science policy (governance and reforms) since the 1960s. The committee for science and technology policy (CSTP) is the core of our analysis. What can we learn about the relations between the national bureaucracy (foreign affairs and ministers for science and technology) and the international bureaucracy? The fieldwork is based on archival work, interviews – (former) members of the CSTP and general- secretariat, representatives of the state, and experts – and institutional literature. Our aim here is to go further the framework of the epistemic communities (Haas, 1992) that is generally used to understand the relations among experts from various countries. We would like to consider another point of view and develop an inter-organizational approach (Thoenig, 2006) to capture relations between the OECD and several components of national bureaucracies, like power games and asymmetric exchanges. This paper wants to provide a better understanding of the transnationalization of science policy by unpacking the role of the OECD as a policy-maker, and the interplay between national and international representatives.

Keywords: International organizations, sociology of organizations   

A contingency approach to alliance building: Partnerships among transnational NGOs and other development actors

Raymond Saner, Centre for Socio-Eco-Nomic Development (CSEND); Lichia Yiu, Centre for Socio-Eco-Nomic Development (CSEND)

Alliance building is part of influencing in the UN context based on convergence of interests and sources of power (reward, coercive, legitimate, referent, expert, resources). In addition, the context of the specific location, New York versus Geneva, also adds constraints and opportunities for partnering amongst the transnational NGOs. NGO participation in the UN has been formalized and NGOs are grouped in "Major Groups" (MG) s Stakeholder Groups (SG) s such as Women, Children and Youth, Indigenous Peoples, Non-Governmental Organizations, Local Authorities, Workers and Trade Unions, Business and Industry, Scientific and Technological Community, Farmers. Later on, additional stakeholder groups were added such as local communities, volunteer groups and foundations, migrants and families, as well as older persons and persons with disabilities. The 9 MGs and 6 additional SGs play an important role particularly during the annual High Level Political Forum (HLPF)   held every year in New York organized by UNDESA with preceding regional SDG review conferences organized by the UN economic commissions. In contrast, NGO participation in SDG related activities in Geneva is different due to several factors:  a) there is no equivalent political event like the HLPF, b) the UN office in Geneva is not directly organizing MGs or SGs and c) the presence of a multitude of International Organizations offers a more decentralized influencing opportunity depending the NGOs priorities e.g. trade (WTO), labour (ILO), health (WHO),  environment (IPCC, UNEP) and other smaller agencies. The authors will compare the alliance building of NGOs in SDG related activities at the United Nations in New York and Geneva based on data collected from published materials, documents, interviews and focus groups.   The timeframe to be covered will be 2013 to 2015 and 2016-2018 covering three years prior to the signing of the 2030 Agenda in 2015 and a three-year period afterwards.

Keywords: International organizations, sociology of organizations   

Sport organisations and the fight against doping: how to explain IOC’s and WADA’s social Performance.

Fabien Ohl, University of Lausanne; Bertrand Fincoeur, University of Lausanne; Lucie Schoch, University of Lausanne

In 2016, the Olympic Movement had to face a major crisis of state sponsored doping in Russia. This crisis raised suspicions about the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-doping Agency’s (WADA) efficiency and integrity. The WADA and the IOC have even been held accountable for the “Russian crisis” and lost part of their credibility. Our research argues that their impaired credibility should not only be explained through their objective failure in preventing doping in Russia but can be mainly understood through an analysis of organizations’ social performance (Alexander, 2011). This study relies on the analysis of a corpus of official policy documents from the IOC and WADA over the last decade, a corpus of 122 journal articles and several other media sources, and field-notes from our “participant-as-observer” role during several anti-doping meetings. To convince the audiences of their commitment to the fight against doping, WADA and the IOC collaborate to create a “team presentation” in which “impression management” is used to stage promises of a strong anti-doping doxa. However, IOC and WADA’s social performance was ineffective, it did not convince for three reasons. First, the crisis revealed the gap between the promises of anti-doping and the widespread doping in Russia. Performances are vulnerable and complicated. Because of its scale, the Russian crisis disrupted the IOC’s and WADA’s dramaturgy, revealing their individual agendas and their rivalries over the control of the doxa, with the IOC seeking to protect its power and WADA trying to remain a “trust device.” IOC and WADA trapped themselves within their own staged discourse because of their divisions and their outbidding promises of clean sport, which turned ineffective and even “toxic.” It was detrimental to the overall anti-doping efforts and the subsequent credibility of these organizations. Second, it demonstrated the extent to which the Russian crisis fragilized the binding role of the sport doxa, reinforced the role of anti-doping stakeholders’ specific ecologies and belittled cooperation between them to display a shared meaning of the situation. Third, embedded in a complex web of interactions and interdependencies with other actors, WADA and the IOC were unable to perform a convincing ‘social performance’ and both were judged to be ineffective and untrustworthy. The results of the study show (1) the relevance of relying on Bourdieu’s field theory to understand that sport organizations trapped themselves with their anti-doping orthodoxy; (2) the usefulness of Abbott’s perspective to understand that sport organizations had difficulties to control the meanings, and to understand how meanings were reframed by the linked ecologies; (3) the importance of the diachronic dimension and the relative autonomy of the meanings of organizations’ social performance.

Keywords: International organizations, sociology of organizations   

The Architecture of Exclusion in UN Intergovernmental Negotiations

Leah Kimber, University of Geneva

The United Nations institutionalized civil society participation since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. Nine "major groups" each with a focused interest gather NGO representatives, academic and think tank researchers. Since then, they have been included in negotiation processes across the UN system to contribute and influence international frameworks. While these institutional mechanisms have been constantly evolving since 1992, the actual inclusion of civil society must be questioned. This paper draws from the sociology of organizations and interest group theory in political science, to analyze this process. Based on data collected from an ethnography while embedded in the Women's Major Group, I shed light on the dynamics of inclusion and hence of exclusion experienced throughout the creation of a text dedicated to disaster risk reduction led by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. The times of the group’s formal inclusion and exclusion, and its strategies to overcome its relative exclusion impact the final ratified text. Based on this case study, the paper aims to address broader questions pertaining to the voices included in decision-making in the context of global governance.

Keywords: International organizations, sociology of organizations